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Last Thanksgiving, an older cousin of mine informed me that my mother, “in the tradition of a certain kind of Jewish woman,” had often” intentionally provoked debate.” Stupefied, I stared at him, unable to square this statement with the progressive, feminist father of two outspoken daughters I had always known him to be. “What do you mean?” I asked. “She liked to cause trouble,” he replied. “To disagree for the sake of it. She thrived on arguing.” Further explanation was not the antidote I had hoped it would be.
Last summer, my uncle, who went to Beverly Hills High with one Nora Ephron and had the privilege of dating her for several months before she left town to attend Wellesley, informed me that Ephron’s wicked humor sprang from her “bitterness over not being pretty.” I said nothing. Pointing out the sexism of his claim, not to mention its antisemitic undertone, would, I knew, prove fruitless. He’d tell me I was nuts, that he could have said the same thing about a man, and that her being Jewish had nothing to do with her looks. Then I’d wish I’d never responded, doubt my intuition, and question my interpretation of the many previous personal experiences that had led to it.
For a time in my childhood, we lived in a house in Coldwater Canyon, a winding mountain road that stretches between Beverly Hills and the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles. My mother was an actress who had migrated from New York City to marry my father and pursue a career in television, and my dad, a graduate of Caltech, had a thriving medical practice. In my early years, they threw a lot of cocktail parties attended by various novelists-turned-screenwriters and performers, who, like my mother, desperately missed New York. One-liners flowed faster than the brandy at those parties, punctuated by bursts of garrulous laughter.
At one such gathering, something happened that forever altered me. A porcelain-skinned actress with strawberry blond curls and piercing blue eyes—as upper-crust WASP in pedigree and appearance as they come—told a joke. It had a long setup, and alas, she flubbed the punchline. My father smiled at her and said the following words: “Don’t feel bad. Everyone knows that a beautiful woman can’t tell a joke.” I was five years old, still in pigtails, and seated at my father’s feet. I felt a flash of rage. At that moment, I hated my father, although I did not yet understand why.
Childhood lessons come in fragments, like puzzle pieces, and it takes years to put the whole sordid picture together. All these years later, I understand that the comment was an assertion of male dominance: women who are not intellectually threatening are allowed to be considered attractive, but if they venture into the raucous boys’ club of comic jousting and win a round, they have to trade in their other trump card: their beauty. Maybe my father thought of quick wit as inherently masculine, a tool of courtship—and women are meant not to court but be courted. Humor is power, so too is beauty. Men can have both; women have to choose.
*
In 1947, my mother was a seven-year-old prodigy: a champion figure skater who performed regularly at Rockefeller Plaza, where even her practice sessions drew hundreds of onlookers. Despite her local fame—she was featured in a spread in Collier’s Magazine headlined “Skating Baby”—she was refused membership to the exclusive (and antisemitic) New York Skating Club. “Even as the camps were liberated and the full horrors of the war were exposed to the world,” she would remind me in a tone both wistful and haunted, “even then, the New York Skating Club refused me because I was a Jew.” (In a folder among my mother’s papers, I discovered a cache of letters exchanged by my grandfather and the New York Skating Club’s board, dancing around the “complications” of admitting his little girl.)
Is it any wonder that my mother, like so many Jewish women of Ephron’s generation, and their mothers before them, prided themselves on cultural assimilation, on their ability to erase any trace of their origins or nationality—their otherness—and on melting into (white) gentile society? In her posthumous memoir Shy, Mary Rodgers, author of the Freaky Friday trilogy and daughter of composer Richard Rodgers, addresses the pathos inspired by early-twentieth-century distaste for Jewish women. Of her mother, she writes that she “was, or at least was promoted as, a rich East Side girl, a princess, an Edith Wharton character except Jewish—though… she tended to downplay that. She was, au fond, anti-Semitic, even though her mother had helped to create the Federation of Jewish Charities thrift shops. Her anti-Semitism was really a version of class paranoia, and we all had it.”
My own mother loved to say that Irving Berlin, “née Bailin,” invented American Christmas by penning the holiday classic “White Christmas.” (He also wrote the song “Easter Parade.”) She loved stories of Jewish immigrants who outdid the gentiles at their own game. So was she praising these Jews for their artistic prowess or for their success at erasing their own Jewishness? Unable to resolve the cognitive dissonance of my mother’s conflicted value system, I absorbed it nonetheless. Being Jewish meant you had to hide in plain sight, but also be surpassingly excellent. It meant fiercely supporting your cultural kin while rejecting the origin of that kinship.
Other experiences reinforced the dissonance. I began working as an actor in television when I was 11. My agent, the fabulous chain-smoking Arletta Proche, had an office on Sunset Boulevard, a block away from where I lived in seventh grade. One day I came in to pick up sides for an audition, and Arletta told me to sit down. “We need to change your name,” she began breezily, as she reached down to pet one of the shaggy wolfhounds napping under her desk. (My last name was my father’s: Engelberg.) “I’m very limited in what I can send you in for with that name, because you don’t look Jewish,” Arletta continued.
That was 1987, an era when Hollywood funneled “ethnic types” into the category of “character actor,” while “white bread types” could audition for leading roles. Ironically, a character actor is defined as one skilled enough to transform entirely for each role, but the connotation was the opposite; “character actor” was slang for anyone “ethnic-looking.”
Meanwhile, I occupied a grey zone: I didn’t look gentile, but I didn’t look like what Hollywood thought Jews looked like, either. At 11, I was cast in a true-crime miniseries that starred Lee Remick as the Mormon-turned-Manhattan socialite Francis Bradshaw, who infamously murdered her father before he had a chance to disown her. She then used her fortune to buy membership on the board of the New York City Ballet. Her daughter, whom I played, studied at the company’s training ground, the School of American Ballet. Lee Remick, for those too young to remember her, was a virtual cartoon of a “shiksa goddess,” and my mother expressed both surprise and delight that I had “squeaked through” the casting process. What tipped the balance was their need for a real ballet dancer—the opening credits for all three nights featured my character, Ariadne, dancing in The Nutcracker. The production did bleach my hair and even considered contact lenses before filming began. Interestingly, my mother had played Tab Hunter’s sister in a live television production of Hans Brinker and The Silver Skates in 1959, when she was 19. Tab Hunter was a blonde, square-jawed matinee idol, and my mother, whose dark hair was also bleached for her role, told me how awful she felt being photographed next to him.
By 13, I believed to my core that not only was there such a thing as looking Jewish, but that Jews who didn’t conform to this physicality had escaped a curse. This luck came with a caveat: If you didn’t “look” Jewish, it was imperative that you didn’t seem Jewish. Keep it under your hat. Be quiet, you made it in.
“Quiet” in general seemed to be a good thing. My mother was a feminist, but she was also pragmatic, and she took a dim view of most mens’ ability to tolerate intelligent, outspoken women. (Perhaps my father, whom she divorced when I was 10, had reinforced this belief in his pithy way.) My first crush was a young actor who was far more handsome than he was quick-witted. My heart stopped when he asked me to dance at a mutual friend’s sweet 16. Afterward, we chatted about a movie he liked. I didn’t like it as much, and I told him why. His face transformed and I knew our romance was over before it began. I cried to my mother that night, and she told me that if I ever wanted to date, I had to “tone down the brilliance.” I flashed back to my conversation with the boy, and suddenly imagined myself as a vulture picking over the remains of a mouse, blood dripping from my witch-like talons.
My mother suffered a brain hemorrhage when she was 69. Overnight, she transformed into a helpless child with no short term memory, and went downhill from there. My first and only child was born two years later, when I was 36. Needless to say, my mother was not available for advice and support. Despite being happily married, I was far from having a healthy sense of self worth. The myth of the unattractive, loud-mouthed Jewish woman still shadowed me; and I worked hard to suppress any behavior that might reveal that I was one.
And then, at 42, I found Nora Ephron. It happened this way: Anxious about my first mammogram, I stopped beforehand at Barnes & Noble to ease my nerves. The shop had a display for I Feel Bad About My Neck, a collection of Ephron’s earlier essays mixed with more recent reflections on middle age. I’d never felt ready to read a book about middle age before, but now I plucked it from the shelf. I read the first few pages and plunked my money down. I did not feel lonely on the crosstown bus, nor in the dreary waiting room of the Weill Cornell Breast Imaging Center. By the time I left the office that drizzly spring evening, I had finished the book. I immediately moved on to the rest of Ephron’s books: Crazy Salad and Scribble Scribble and Wallflower at the Orgy and Heartburn. In all these books I found sophistication, sagacity, confidence, wit: the jewels that made her prose sparkle.
Ephron wrote unsentimental, tough-minded essays, several of which, such as “A Word About Breasts” and “On Having Never Been a Prom Queen,” address the topic of physical beauty. Ephron felt that beauty was a valuable commodity, and indeed, one that she envied, but if a sense that she was not Greta Garbo pervaded her with gloom, she never let it show in her writing. She wrote about political conventions, authors she adored, authors she despised, women’s periodicals, vaginal products, feminism, her enviable good fortune in finding a rent-controlled apartment in New York City. In her autobiographical novel Heartburn, she wrote about humiliation, about being dumped by your husband for another woman near the end of your second pregnancy, whale-like and bloated and waddling to group therapy. Ephron’s humor did not spring from bitterness, but from its opposite: a life-affirming determination to find the upside of a challenge. She also understood that nothing eases pain like laughter. Her essays are now de rigeur, as canonical as, well, “White Christmas” at Christmastime.
Finding Ephron’s essays as I entered my forties was serendipitous, or maybe just the opposite: I had instinctively sought what I needed at that time in my life. As a person who had recently gestated, spent three years breastfeeding, and had at last delivered her four-year-old to her first day of preschool, I faced a vista. I now had six hours a day, between dropoff and pickup, in which I could do something other than visit playgrounds, make tiny lunches, and sing lullabies—well, not a vista so much as, say, a view from a decent-sized window. My top priority was earning money. I had begun to sell my own writing here and there, banging out essays while my daughter napped. I wrote on any topic I could snag a few dollars for. (Eight years ago, online periodicals swallowed personal essays the way a whale devours plankton: opening up its giant maw and collecting them en masse with no discrimination.) Anyway, those six free hours gave me some time to ponder my “next act.” Struggling as I was with the changes wrought by motherhood, I craved inspiration. Nora Ephron, who had written about womanhood with unique panache, fit the bill.
There are a lot of fanciful qualities that mothers are associated with and saddled by. But our culture rarely sees mothers as glamorous, and at least for my generation and the ones before it, that goes triple for Jewish mothers. Here’s what Nora showed me: that not only could you be glamorous and Jewish, but it could be your very Jewishness—your cultural rhythms, gilded by trace amounts of Yiddish inflection and biting Jewish humor—that was the actual source of your glamor. Nora was the intersection of three identities: woman, Jew, mother. She was also seductively witty, elegantly to the point, and stylish even when discussing her darkest days. As a bonus, for me, she was the daughter of an alcoholic, and handled even this—perhaps especially this—with her characteristic light touch, providing a master class in revelation without maudlin excess.
“One day,” Ephron writes in her 2010 essay “The Legend,” “my mother was not an alcoholic, and the next day she was a complete lush.” That’s not how it went down with my own mother, who was hooked on opiates from the time I was a toddler. Like Phoebe Ephron, my mother was a woman of great talent and accomplishment who knew how to throw a dinner party like nobody’s business. She was a competitive figure skater, a dancer on Broadway, and an actress on television, appearing on lots of shows, including Days of Our Lives and Bewitched. But in my youth, she became a speech-slurring, hollow-eyed, pathos-ridden addict. She had her reasons.
I shy away from the narrative built on childhood trauma, at least trauma as mild as having a mom who was out of it on prescription drugs. It feels too easy, too undignified, and definitely too personal. Besides, as Mary Rodgers writes, again about her own mother, “You can’t stay angry at people when you understand that they couldn’t help being who they were.” My grandmother had been a stage mother for the ages, hitting my mother over the head with a hairbrush when she didn’t land her jumps and informing her that she was “rotten from the day she was born.” Now that’s the kind of trauma that can alter a life’s path. Later, my mother was torn by marriage from the only city she ever loved and plopped down in the only city she ever hated. Abused from a young age and therefore vulnerable to depression, she could not help who she became.
In spite of this, my mother was funny, beautifully dressed, tough and feminine and ineffably, rhythmically Jewish. Like Nora Ephron: Jewish but glamorous. Jewish and glamorous. Glamorous, in part, because she was Jewish. I didn’t notice this in my youth, that my mother’s humor and her twist on life were inextricably bound to an ancient tongue and culture she had all but renounced. But I realized it when I read Nora Ephron. Further, Nora had a mom she missed, a mom who was for long periods of her life not a good mother because addiction had stolen her away. Addiction (and then brain injury) stole my mother as well, and Nora’s essays provided the guidance I needed. She gave me a way of looking at the world that made things tolerable: if you laugh, it lifts some of the emotional burden of life. Also, it is possible to speak your mind—and write—without self-indulgence. Get over yourself, she seems to say. Have some perspective. Laugh and the world laughs with you.
In her 2013 essay collection, Sister Mother Husband Dog, Nora’s sister Delia Ephron characterized their mother this way: “My mother believed in non-conformity. We, her daughters, were expected to be non-conformists, too.” In their house, she continues, “laughter was the point, not prayer.” There’s a lot to unpack in that sentence. It is a rejection of the religion that marks Jews as “other,” but also a declaration of humor as a cultural fingerprint. Ethnic shame and cultural pride have long tangoed in the bloodstreams of American Jews. Phoebe Ephron might have offered mixed lessons on being Jewish, but her belief in feminism was wholehearted. To get out of PTA meetings, Phoebe would say, “You’ll just have to tell them your mother can’t be there, she has to work.” Nora recalls Phoebe as a mother “who had it all, before there was such a thing.”
My mother’s deepest regret was not returning to her career after she had her children. Whatever you do, she warned, don’t give up. My mother found other ways to assert her identity after she became a mother, however small and ineffectual. For example, she loved to tell people that two days after she gave birth to my sister, she was at Saks Fifth Avenue for the annual glove sale. It used to annoy my sister, our mother’s pride in her instant postpartum fitness and her rejection of such gooey things as breastfeeding and proximity to her newborn. But my mother, whether she knew it or not, was expressing something more significant: She was still a person. She was a person who had had a baby, but she could still leave the house for the sake of fashion or a bargain or whatever other errand she felt justified the departure.
Meanwhile, when Heartburn was published, Ephron was pilloried by the press: “The infidelity of husband toward a wife is banal compared to the infidelity of a mother toward her children,” read the astonishingly misogynistic Vanity Fair review. “Here is Carl Bernstein and adultery; there is Nora Ephron and child abuse. It is no contest.” So Ephron was a terrible mother—nay, an abuser—for writing about her husband’s infidelity because writing about it would damage her sons. The mind boggles.
Richard Cohen, a friend of Ephron’s who wrote about her in his 2017 book She Made Me Laugh, affirms that among their social circle, it was “a common refrain. What about the kids? What about Max and Jacob? When they grew up, what would they think of their father… They would be the talk of the Upper West Side sliding pond, the sandbox, the lox line at Zabar’s. They would be ruined.”
To be clear: Heartburn is about a woman’s distress at the end of her marriage. It’s about feeling foolish and fat and forgotten, and about negotiating with life for a better narrative, a happier act two. Heartburn is not about Ephron’s sons; it does not reconstruct moments from their childhoods, such as their malapropisms, or their first crushes, or whether their favorite stuffed toys were elephants or teddy bears. (Meanwhile, male writers like Calvin Trillin built careers in part by writing about their kids’ quirks, to the tune of dollar signs and critical acclaim.)
As for what the boys would think of their own father, is it incumbent upon spouses who’ve been cheated on to keep the treachery secret? Their dad did something dishonorable, but it falls to the mother to keep it hidden? Frankly, I’d rather my own mother have written a comic souffle about my father’s many infidelities than simply relay the bad news in dreary conversations. Still, her flaw in talking about it too much was nothing compared to his flaw in committing the offense. I loved and adored my father—he was a terrific dad in numerous ways and I miss him terribly—but my own dealings with him taught me that he was no saint, and certainly not the feminist he thought himself to be. If anyone thought Heartburn revealed anything that the boys and their social circles didn’t know about already, they had another think coming.
*
The German Jews who arrived on America’s shores in the first great wave considered themselves more cultivated than the second-wave Jews from Russia, who were mostly peasants. German Jews, who tended to come from cities, were more refined, less religious, and eager to become “American.” Many of them considered the Eastern European Jews who followed an embarrassment. “Ordinarily, the earlier Jewish immigrants tried to emulate the social graces of the old guard,” writes Michael Alexander in Jazz Age Jews. “Unlike children of the great Eastern European migrations, descendents of earlier immigrants tended more readily to adopt the social views of the American establishment…. That is to say, when earlier waves of immigrant Jews had come to America they identified up, not down.”
Mary Rodgers writes in her memoir that her mother made sure that people knew she came from a higher class than her husband, the illustrious Richard Rodgers: “She claimed her people were German Jews, unlike my father’s, who were Russian.” As for my own mother, she was always inexplicably proud of her grandmother’s recipe for lentil soup. “It’s German lentil soup,” she would explain. Rye bread without caraway seeds? Not in my mother’s house! That was Russian rye.
In The Follies of God, author James Grissom quotes Elia Kazan’s reflection on the psychological forces that drive people throughout their lives: ”Always go to the beginnings. The real person will always be found there.” Kazan was speaking of the actress Jessica Tandy, who carried the shame of childhood poverty into her adult life. She was careful to hide any trace of her origins, to compensate with acute attention to her demeanor in the public sphere. Kazan says that he cast Tandy as Blanche in “A Streetcar Named Desire” after seeing that “she understood the lies we tell in order to survive.”
In at least one of her essays, I sense that Nora Ephron is telling one such lie. In “Journalism: A Love Story,” Ephron writes that Condé Nast editor Jane Green served as a role model: “She was an older woman, about twenty-five, very stylish and sophisticated, and she knew everyone too.” Green, Ephron continues, also once asked her “what kind of Jew” she was. About which Ephron writes: “I had never heard of the concept of what kind of Jew you were. Jane was a German Jew, which was not to say she was from Germany but that her grandparents had been. She was extremely pleased about it. I had no idea it mattered.”
I don’t believe that Nora Ephron had “never heard” of the concept of “what kind of Jew you were”—it was too common a refrain in Jewish households of the era. It was still common in households of my era. But claiming that she hadn’t heard of it implies indifference, and indifference implies confidence—that she was so carefree, so certain of herself that she was oblivious to social distinctions. I think this was Nora’s “lie.” It is a blink-and-you-miss-it kind of lie, one that only women particularly invested in this part of her identity—such as myself—might catch. But the lie fell apart later on. Nora’s cover was blown by what she later produced: her films.
*
In a recent essay for the New Yorker, Rachel Syme writes that “the great irony of Ephron’s afterlife
is how quickly she’s been reduced to sentimental lore. Since her death… the romanticization of her work has swelled like a movie score. A writer of tart, acidic observation has been turned into an influencer: revered for her aesthetic, and for her arsenal of life-style tips. On TikTok, memes like ‘Meg Ryan Fall’—the actress starred in Ephron hits like When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle, and You’ve Got Mail—celebrate the prim oxford shirts, baggy khakis, and chunky knit sweaters that Ephron immortalized on screen.
Syme goes on to blame her fans’ conflation of the writer “with the genre—romance—that she interrogated. I wish this were true. Instead, the fault lies not with Nora’s fans, but with Nora herself. Screenwriting was her second act, or maybe her third, depending on how you divide her career. The first film she both wrote and directed was autobiographical; it was called This Is My Life, and it starred Julie Kavner as a stand-in for Nora. The film bombed both critically and commercially. From this she seemed to learn the lesson that a Jewish actress with a Jewish sensibility was not something that could carry the box office. And I think she made a decision: never again. Even before she cast Meg Ryan as her journalist counterpart in When Harry Met Sally, she cast Meryl Streep as Rachel Stamsat in the film adaptation of Heartburn. Rarely does Streep fail to convey the essence of a character, but on more than one occasion, she has failed at believably playing a Jew. By the time we get to When Harry Met Sally, Meg Ryan plays Ephron’s stand-in.
Ephron had written that she had “no idea” that it mattered “what kind of Jew” she was. “And by the way,” she continued, “it didn’t really. Those days were over.” Maybe she believed that when she wrote those words, but it’s hard to fathom that she still believed it when she was casting Meg Ryan as her movie counterpart.
Let me start with a caveat: I love When Harry Met Sally as much as anyone of a certain age—by which I mean people old enough to have seen it for the first time in an actual movie theater. Still, it marks a transition: Ephron’s foot on the slippery slope to her own erasure. It is a Christmas card of a movie, featuring what is arguably the greatest montage of snowy New York City images ever. Yes, there is some biting dialogue, and even discernibly Jewish couples describing their youthful exploits, but overall, it is a gentile film in look and feel.
And then we get to Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail, films so treacly and poorly plotted one would never guess they were written by the same woman who penned Heartburn. The films are airbrushed of any trace of the real Nora Ephron, or at least who she was when she invented herself as a writer. It is the blandness that is the most disappointing, or maybe the way the camera lingers on Meg Ryan’s lustrous hair and sparkling blue eyes. Or it’s that the characters Ryan plays—still ostensibly stand-ins for Nora—have been knee-capped by sweetness. Where is the acerbic wit, the joy in iconoclasm, the confidence that made her essays distinct? If people love the films for the chunky knit sweaters, it’s because their visual aesthetic is all there is to love about them. The words are no longer the point.
It makes me think about how Nora Ephron ultimately rejected her idol, Dorothy Parker. Syme writes that “once Ephron started reading deep into Parker’s work, she found much of it to be corny and maudlin and, to use Ephron’s withering words, so embarrassing.” But that’s because Ephron wasn’t looking in the right place. Had Ephron ever read, for example, Parker’s essay introducing James Thurber’s collection, Men, Women, and Dogs? The piece is written with a masterful mixture of delicacy and force. “The Telephone Call,” one of Parker’s short stories, remains a startlingly accurate and nuanced portrait of romantic heartache.
Many years ago, my father asserted that a beautiful woman couldn’t tell a joke. Ephron seems to agree with him in her films, or is at least willing to play to this peculiar convention. Meg Ryan is mostly the straight man to Billy Crystal in When Harry Met Sally. True, Carrie Fisher gets a few terrific punchlines, but her character is the “unconventional” sidekick. But Ephron’s essays (and one novel) are another story: in those, Ephron is the leading lady and the funny one. Which is precisely what made her so beautiful to me. She had escaped the trap; she had been sharply assertive and intensely appealing at the same time. Men were charmed by her and women wanted to be her. She made bluntness an artform and made female confidence an aesthetic standard for other women to aspire to. She made a keen sense of humor as stylish as a vintage Chanel handbag. She was glamorous not despite her humor, but because of it. She sent my father to the naughty chair with her words, banished the rules about gender and humor with the swoop of her pen. At least she did for me.
In response to a beautiful friend complaining that she was “losing her looks,” Ephron once wrote: “One of the few advantages to not being beautiful is that one usually gets better-looking as one gets older; I am, in fact, at this very moment, gaining my looks.” This is Ephron at her best; even as she reveals a hard-nosed acceptance of her own lack of traditional beauty, she spreads her lustrous feathers with a brilliant bon mot. And the sentiment expresses something I hope could be true for all women, whatever mythologies distort our self-images: we should all be gaining as we get older; gaining in self-worth by tossing out the beliefs that have made us fear raising our hands in school, being clever, or demanding credit for our work. Because wising up and claiming your spot in the world? Well, let’s just say it’s a very good look.
